The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [28]
“Désolé.” Someone bumped into his small table. Marshall, glancing up, saw a stooped man with a battered black valise, hurrying on past Marshall’s table.
Désolé! He was sorry, too. He was always amused that the French were desolated if they were late or jostled you in a crowd or dropped a pea from a fork. He was in a period of desolation, he thought, then quickly checked himself.
HE DIDN’T KNOW where to begin. In all his years of flying to Paris, he hadn’t been back to the zoo. He hadn’t lingered at any of the train stations. He had never tried to find the Vallon family. He wasn’t sure where they were living when they sheltered him in the spring of 1944. As he walked through the city now, his mind turned the noise and color into tense, quiet, bleached-out scenes, garnished with grim red-and-black flags, the swastikas cartwheeling in the breeze, the ubiquitous cow-manure color of the German uniforms standing in stark relief. One afternoon after school Annette had taken him on a zigzag tour of the sights of Paris. With most of his time spent indoors, he found Paris that day fleeting and bewildering—the grand plazas, the ornate, ancient buildings, the bizarre long-necked Eiffel Tower wearing a gigantic Nazi flag like an apron. Or did he remember that flag from a photograph? He wasn’t sure.
Annette guided him on other walks close to his hideaway, the Vallons’ apartment. He remembered being careful not to put his hands in his pockets, as Americans did. Don’t jingle your change! he was told. He did not smoke in public, for fear of holding his cigarette the uncultured American way, fingers outstretched, instead of with an insouciant, inward-turning grip of thumb and forefinger. He wanted to smoke, no matter how he had to hold the cigarette, but often there weren’t any. Not even the bitter Gauloises.
Annette walked in front, and he followed, ten meters behind. If she stopped at a news kiosk to thumb through the magazines, he was supposed to keep going and saunter over to the other side of the street. When she resumed her walk, he could resume his. In this peculiar stagger, she managed outings for him. Away from the center of the city there were fewer German soldiers, more day-to-day lives—people waiting in lines for food, some seeking the extra morsels to feed a large American pilot hiding in the closet or a forbidden live duck kept in the bathtub.
His snapshot memories of the Paris streets: There was an air of normal city life. People managed to look fashionable, if slightly shabby. He remembered women in high hats or scarves wrapped on their heads or tied under the chin. They carried baskets and bags for the marketing. Now and then a frolicking child seemed to paint a dash of color on the drab urban canvas.
AFTER SETTLING INTO a meager but sufficient single with floral walls and a television with a broken knob, Marshall went to visit Jim Donegan, a pilot he knew who lived in Paris. Jim, who had retired two years before, had urged Marshall to call whenever he was in Paris. He had married a Frenchwoman after divorcing his second wife. During the war Jim piloted a B-26 Marauder; he was in the first swarm on D-Day.
Jim and Iphigénie lived in the Seventh Arrondissement, and Marshall decided to walk there. The day was warm, with a soft glow, fuzzy through the lush early-summer trees. The coffee had briskly reset his mental clock. He wanted to live on Paris time, and he thought beating jet lag was a matter of will. Denying his need for sleep, he set out from the hotel and detoured over to the Eiffel Tower, where he muddled through throngs of tourists.
He always thought the tower was like something from The War of the Worlds, this gangly giraffe of an alien. He had been to the top only once, with one of the stewardesses, Melissa Littleton, during a long layover years ago, when he flew 707s. Where was she now? He never saw her again after their return flight to JFK. He couldn’t remember what else they did in Paris, or where they stayed.
He quickly fled the wild hubbub beneath the tower.